The Booker Prize Foundation announced that the International Booker Prize is being renamed the Bukhman International Booker Prize, in recognition of Bukhman Philanthropies, the charitable foundation of Russian-born billionaire Dmitri Bukhman and his wife, Daria.
The family name was added to the prize’s title after the Bukhmans’ charity committed to funding the award for the next decade and doubled the winner’s purse, from £50,000 to £100,000.
The International Booker Prize is awarded for a work of fiction originally written in another language, translated into English, and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.
Bukhman’s net worth is estimated at $13.6 billion. With his brother Igor, he co-founded the mobile-game developer Playrix. The brothers started the company in Vologda, Russia, but Playrix has long been headquartered in Ireland. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the company shut down its Russian operations.
How to Get to Heaven from Belfast | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Very funny. 3 squirrely women go to a small town in Ireland to attend a funeral for their friend. Except their friend isn't dead, but somebody else is. There is some nefarious scheme running in the background, but our three dames can't figure out 1) if they want to do anything about it, and 2) what they should do if they do want to do anything about it, so they spend a lot of time arguing about what they should do, or not. Hijinks ensue.
House of Guinness | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
It's 1868 in Dublin Ireland and Guinness is a thriving operation brewing zillions of gallons of beer, putting it in barrels and shipping it all over Ireland and England. The old man dies and his kids have to pick up the slack. Only one of them has the will and ability to do so, the others are variations of flaky rich kids. Most of the show is about the contortions they go through to maintain their façade of 'respectability' in Victorian high society. Thinking about this for a bit, I realized they were just playing the Victorian version of political correctness. Now, thanks to the internet, everyone can play. Live by celebrity, die by celebrity.
The show has all the regular drama you might expect from a Netflix show about rich Victorians along with some fabulous sets. Talk about the divide between the rich and the poor, the Victorians had it in spades. It also has some bits of history and if you look a little deeper, trains.
Ireland has just endured a famine, and there are hard feelings about that.
The Trinity College harp, also known as "Brian Boru's harp", is a medieval musical instrument on display in the long room at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. It is an early Irish harp or wire-strung cláirseach. It is dated to the 14th or 15th century and, along with the Queen Mary Harp and the Lamont Harp, is the oldest of three surviving medieval harps from the region. The harp was used as a model for the coat of arms of Ireland and for the trade-mark of Guinness stout. - Wikipedia
Brian Boru (c. 941 – 1014) was the High King of Ireland from 1002 to 1014. - Wikipedia
The Train within a Train & the Railway Built for Beer - Guinness Brewery Railways
Train of Thought
Somewhere around the late 19th century the brewery was expanded to 50 acres and a narrow gauge railway was laid down to serve the plant.
The business about having a carriage that allowed the narrow-gauge engine to run on standard width tracks might be unique. Someone thought it was worth building a live steam model.
Working on a story for the Guardian, our girl Dove gets tangled up with the Official Secrets Act, so her boss sends her to Bodkin, Ireland, to help Gilbert, a podcaster who is working on a story about three people who disappeared 25 years ago. The comedy, such as it is, arises mostly from a contrast of styles. The podcaster just wants to get people to tell their stories and he thinks being nice to people will get him what he wants. He comes across as a bit foolish. Yeah, betting eight large that you don't have against a local gypsy kind of seals that deal. By comparison Dove is hard nosed and rude. Emma, Gilbert's 'researcher' is a neophyte to this whole business of actually talking to strangers.
They go to poking around and talking to people and you have never met a more evasive bunch, no straight answers here. Some it is because the locals are used to talking to other locals and so assume a certain amount of common knowledge that our intrepid reporters do not have. Like, how can you not know Frank? Everyone fricking knows Frank. Well, yeah, everyone who lives here might, but our gang is not from here. It's also because many of them are old and a little befuddled, to put it nicely. But then right quick we learn there is skulduggery afoot in Bodkin and people are lying to conceal it. Dad burn criminals.
Bodkin is fictional, but County Cork is real and is the southwestern most part of Ireland.
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN | Official Trailer | Searchlight Pictures
SearchlightPictures
Colin Farrell & Brendan Gleeson have made another movie. They made In Bruges back in 2008. In Bruges, as I recall, was about a couple of bumbling hitmen who stumble their way through a hit. The 'hit' was just a frame to hang the interaction between these two characters. It was okay if you like watching a couple of people bumbling along. The Banshees of Inisherin is much the same, though there is even less of a plot, and instead of bumbling, we have active crazy/stupid. Some people liked this movie. I didn't. I will remember it, but only for being stupid.
"A compelling revenge thriller" describes it very well.. Potato famine in Ireland 1847. Soldier comes back from Afghanistan, finds his mother and brother dead and sets about executing all those he deems responsible. You get an up close view of just how ghastly conditions were then. Revenge is sweet, but you know how this ends.
That's a military war machine, a tank. Going by the amount of crud covering it looks like it has been down there a while. Given that we can see color and the background isn't totally black, it might not be too deep. Plus we have a SCUBA diver, but that isn't a good indicator because SCUBA divers can go very deep with special equipment. This picture sparked my interest, so I did a little checking. The tank was cargo on the Empire Heritage, which had a string of bad luck.
Empire Heritage, a 15,702 GRT tanker, was launched in 1930, hit a mine in January 1941 and beached. Refloated in March 1941 and beached, but broke in two and declared a total loss. To MoWT, repaired and renamed Empire Heritage. Torpedoed September 1944 and sunk by U-482. - paraphrased from Wikipedia
MoWT is the Ministry of War Transport. Empire Heritage was one of about a zillion Empire ships:
An Empire ship is a merchant ship that was given a name beginning with "Empire" in the service of the Government of the United Kingdom during and after World War II.
. . .
New Empire ship construction represented an enormous undertaking that included classes of freighters, tankers, aircraft carriers, fast cargo liners, tank landing ships, Deep Sea Salvage and Rescue Tugs and several other categories. Total production numbered in the hundreds.
Empire ships were supplements to Britain's normal peacetime merchant fleet, swelling its wartime numbers to 12,000, then the largest merchant ship fleet in the world. Approximately 4,000 ships on the British register were lost between 1939 and 1945, a considerable number being sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic. - Wikipedia
